HPC 60. Alice Yao on Han Archeology

0:00Hello and welcome to the history of philosophy in China by Peter Adamsen and Karen Leigh, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoflossovie.net. Today's episode will be an interview about archaeology and the Han Dynasty, with Alice Yao, who is professor of anthropology and of the social sciences at the University of Chicago. Hello, Alice. Hey. Thank you so much for joining us and side stepping from archaeology into a history of philosophy podcast. So I think we're going to learn a lot from you here. And we probably should start with the basics, given that we've said very little about archaeology so far in the series, except for things like, you know, that we dig up oracle bones, sharps and so on. Previously in the series, we've been mostly talking about texts, of course.

1:01And we've mostly been talking about the warring states in and now the Han periods. Obviously the Han period is more recent than the warring states period and the brief gene dynasty. So it would stand to reason that there's just more stuff to dig out of the ground for the Han than the earlier periods. Can you say something about what we can in fact find and maybe is there a difference between what we find for the earlier period and what we find in the Han period? Yeah, thanks Peter for having me first of all. Compared to the earlier periods, like you said, there is just more stuff, more remains or ruins, imperial settlements during the Han compared other to the Qing. But a lot of the stuff looks pretty similar. Roof tiles, infrastructures, like walls and wells, irrigation features. I mean, a lot of that just resembles what you would find in Qing settlements. And even the tombs are mounted, large mounted elite tombs and they dot the landscape in

2:06pressure on the central plains. But it's different about the Han periods. You start to see these very iconic, what we consider to be central plains, traditional tomb structure appearing along the frontiers in the south and also along the northwest. And so there's a sense of this kind of like spatial expansion and transfer a lot of the technological and infrastructural features of the state beginning with the Qing and the transfer of a lot of this infrastructure out into the hinterlands. And even pushing against the boundaries of the Qing Great Wall, we start to see some of these debris and bruins associated with villages and houses now extending further north of the Great Wall. You see the sort of mobile, very durable kind of material becoming mobile in this geographical expansion and project of the Han. And so that's what I would say is primarily the kind of contrast that one sees on the ground, at least from archaeology.

3:08Because a lot of times we're just walking in the landscape, typical practice is what's called landscape survey. It's a lot like geology where you just go out and you do these long extended reconnaissance of tracks of land looking for any kind of debris. And now that is assisted with satellite imagery, which helps us to identify things from a bird's eye view, we don't even actually have to be on the ground for some of the fieldwork. Oh, that's really interesting. And of course, what we can find, well, not we, but what you can find is really determined by the material it's made of. Right. So we're basically talking about things made of stone ceramic, I guess glass, perhaps. Correct. Yeah, metal, four bronze and bones and bones and burial cases, right? Exactly. So it sounds like what you're saying is that the physical remains the material culture eras out the impression that we get from the text, which is that the gene and then the

4:08Han Dynasties are just much more systematic and have a much better kind of state control over the situation, which is why they're able to build infrastructure in a way that couldn't be built during the war in state's period. Is that right? Yeah. And I think this question of really trying to think around what is a state space in the Han is somewhat different from before. I think part of what's interesting about that is we have this kind of ideology or the term all under heaven, right, which is very much like a pre and peeral historical construct. So one of the interesting questions is to think about how that idea has changed over this period from the Joe up now into the Han or even from the warring states to the Han. Like what is this idea doing? And how is the sort of new imperial sovereign thinking with or thinking along with this idea and how can we examine that shift on the ground?

5:09That's really interesting. A lot of the finds are presumably in some sort of religious context, right? So burials would be religiously connotated. You mentioned these dome tombs. There's also going to be temples or altars, which will sites. So what did these sites tell us about early Chinese religious beliefs? Do they complement, confirm challenge what we find in texts at all? There's only one well established shrine or temple and that is the Huangmengsh temple outside of Chang'an. And that came pretty late. Aside from that major temple complex, there's actually very little evidence or actual durable remains of ritual activity, at least state level and ritual activity. What we see for the most part are the inclusions of what we call spirit articles in burials from

6:11both the non-elite, up to the elites. And you know, they're the whole array of burial goods, which kind of gestured to this understanding the conception of the afterlife. And so to me, the idea of the afterlife is probably the most pervasive what we would consider religious idea that's proliferating across the empire. And some of the transmission of these ideas, I don't think, can be attributed solely to elites or so-called transmitters of Confucian values. I think a lot of it is happening among the lower class substrate or aspirational lower class people were probably not of high rank as they're experimenting with different kinds of burial goods that might help them reckon with the afterlife for what that means when the body goes through this liminal transition and whether there's this transcendent world out there and what's happening to the soul. So you see across burials, the emergence of mirrors, bronze mirrors become very popular.

7:17And for a long time, we thought bronze mirrors were just this mass commodity that the Han state produced as a toiletry item. Increasingly, these mirrors are put in place in burials in such a way, suggesting that people were using them as a burial good in part because they have this geometric function or they relate to cosmological concepts, perhaps. And they're put in the burial in positions close to the body and there's some ideas that this may be connected to changing conceptions of what corporate reality meant. So that's kind of exciting to think about. Maybe there's this popular religion that's developing. What do you mean by geomantic? Sometimes the mirrors have a central nod on the back or they have a knob situated on a square kind of motif or square design. And it's thought that these might be used for orientation, room relation to the stars. They're these geomantic boards that also have a square and different corners of the

8:20square have these hooks. And they're meant to be rotational orientational devices that you can then orient relative to the constellations or to particular stars in the night sky. This is a naive question, but when you talk about these grave goods, is the idea as straight forward as people are being buried with things that they can bring with them to the afterlife or is it more symbolic than that or do we not know? We do not know. I think there's still an acted debate about what the afterlife is. Is it just this underworld? Is it just like the everyday world or is it some kind of transcendent space where the soul undergoes a transformation, the physical body versus this idea of the soul? There are these terms called the plow and linguistically. There are these two different terms that are used to refer to the postmortem body. I think for people who study Han religion, this is key in trying to wrestle with what these entities actually mean.

9:21Whether there's really a transcendent soul or whether that kind of separation never really develops in a kind of metaphysics. To what extent can more jewelry burial goods help flesh out some of these tensions and debates that are happening in the text? I don't know. But I think the mirrors themselves are one that give us a clue into that kind of a quandary. There are a couple of other mortuary items. I think that can also be pulled into this kind of distillation of what is actually going on as people practice or put these ideas into practice. One thing this puts me in mind of is that there was a debate in the warring states period about how to bury people and how to celebrate them at a funeral. So you have the Moist saying we should save money and blow it all on these expensive funerals. And we have the confusion saying no, no, no, we have to show appropriate respect to the dead. And even within that debate, especially in Shunze, the great Confucian author, there's

10:24this description about how you bury higher ranking people and more elaborate coffins. And so what you were just describing that there's not sort of neat cutoff between the humble peasants and the elites, but rather there's a more continuous kind of ranking and you have these sort of aspirational burial sites. Yeah. So there's not just two different societies here, rather there's one society with different gradations. And in a way, you already see that in Shunze that he's saying, well, of course, there's levels, social rank and the burial should some hour reflect that according to Shunze. Yeah. And I see the Han as carrying on this continuation of the same dialogue of the debate from the warring states. And as you talk about Shunze's commentary on the why having graded prescriptions around mortuary elaborations, really important. The Han we see people actually trying to skirt all these prescriptions.

11:24I think a straight who did it was actually this is a chain burial where they recover a copy of the statutes on burials. It actually spells out individual this rank should have a mound of no higher than seven meters or something. And then the mountains themselves are graded by height. The number of coffins are graded by rank two. But given how many burials have been recovered for the Han period, even among the elite burials, it seems like the elites themselves are scurrying some of these prescriptions or some shure rules, if you will. So again, putting them in the space of the confusion and the most debate, how much is too much or how much is enough to show proper grief. So I think that even the people in the middle straight and are also contending with this issue. So I'm putting way more than what they're conventionally supposed to put in the grave.

12:26You can easily imagine sort of arguments within the family. What are the results? Are we going to be pouring into this grave? Right. Is it about a throwing sincerity to the dead or is it about networking with the people coming attending the funeral? Well, that's true. There's a social display aspect too, isn't there? Yeah. Right. And that's not only true for the elite. What about more kind of everyday things? Can we tell from archaeology things like what they were eating and how they were eating, how they lived, what their living spaces were like? Yes. Well, there are a lot of these funeral articles, burial models of houses. I show this kind of courtyard style, a man or a like his states. Oftentimes they show a very well equipped home with a stove, a pen, a pig's die. But you never really see the interior quarters of a house.

13:27The houses show economic activity, domestic economic activity. And they also, so they symbolize wealth more than I think what's at the actuality on the ground. Think of your kitchen stove. And when you cook, sometimes food boils over and collects on your stove top and it's carbonized. So archaeologists are mostly working with that kind of carbonized food remains to piece back together the actual dietary profile for a lot of these lower straight-em or because your commoner households. And what they're eating is pretty much what you get from the text, the major grains, millet, rice, wheat, I think hemp and sorghum, in some cases, rice. But what we're actually seeing from the haunt period, especially after hung deep is that there's a lot of millet even in the south giving this impression that we're not really sure if it's out migration from the interior in the south.

14:32And people are bringing millet because they like to taste the millet as a central plain staple. They want to say move south. It's actually a lot more millet than rice, which is I think, do you think about how people bring their comfort food maybe as they're being displaced or transferred to other parts of the empire? I like the idea by the way that we know a lot about what was eaten by people who weren't good at paying attention to whether the pots were boiling over. I'm more careful because we have no idea what they ate. Yeah. It also gives you paws like, oh, maybe there's something good. I'm not cleaning my stuff. Exactly. Yeah. If people out there don't follow this advice, you should always clean your stuff. Very important. So that mentioned you made of not being able to see into domestic spaces very much. Makes me wonder whether archaeology tells us very much about the role of women in society. So obviously we'd find burials of women, right? But given that one often feels that women are excluded from the textual tradition quite

15:34a bit, although we will be actually getting on to women thinkers in the Han period, which will be good. Oh, good. So, but mostly the textual tradition in ancient China just as in other pre-modern traditions is very male dominated. Do you think that would also apply to archaeology that you're learning a lot about men and not very much about women? I think so. I think the most recent article that came out about women was a piece done on the imperial mausoleum outside of Xinjiang when it was from the Qing. And what there were mostly interest is looking at skeletal remains of women buried around the mausoleum. And they in particular focused on pathologies that were developed over time from kneeling or her activities, the stressors from doing textile labor. So a lot of it was like looking for evidence of women's labor and that has tended to be

16:39how, I think archaeologists have approached the study of gender is to try and understand domestic labor or gendered labor. So I guess it's a kind of limited narrow purview on the role of women in society. So rather than challenging the kind of textual silences as we would say in anthropology, we're actually just trying to match the skeletal evidence to the text. The text kind of tells us what to look for and the remains confirm what we learned from the text for the most part. Because of course the text are also telling us that labor was very gendered. Right? Yes. We then cook and then fight and argue about politics. Yes, yes. Yeah. So speaking of the arguing about politics, maybe we can say a little bit more about the status of the Han Dynasty as an imperial power. So you've already mentioned Shangan a couple of times, which is one of their two imperial

17:41capital cities, right? And I don't know, as you mentioned, a ritual center that was on the outskirts of that. So we have a good sense of how these cities were laid out, for example. Can we reconstruct that? Changlin is unusual. Rather than putting the capital in Loyang, which is the traditional capital or center of the world, they moved it to further west to where the Tang had their own capital region. And Changlin is unusual because it was built from the ground up. It didn't occupy a former city. And the layout, it's not laid out according to the Calgonji, the ideal capital laid out in the Calgonji text, which is supposed to be like a perfect square with exact measurements. I can't remember whether dimensions are exactly with cardinal roads dividing the city into thirds. But Tang is not neatly laid out like that.

18:45It's off-center in some places. The roads don't create these nice tripartite divisions. So there's something really unique about Tang that I think we don't quite understand what the original designer had in mind and why they made these decisions of where to put the roads. And so this is strange too, Chang, contrary to the text, is not a cosmograph on Earth because it doesn't conform with the Calgonji's model. What does one do with that exactly? But doesn't look or conform to those ideals, what is the center of empire? And that's an interesting question to think about. What kinds of considerations actually went into building this massive city? And then in terms of empire, there's another kind of dynamic that I think develops in terms of city layout. So as the Han established themselves as the new sovereign, a lot of these cities that

19:49were the capitals of former kingdoms and warring state centers get downgraded. So we see this kind of scaling up of Chang'an and the downgrading of some of these former major capitals, cities. And so you see some of these cities like in Beenzu and some of the cities in the north. They're no longer repaired. So you don't see the walls being repaired. You see a kind of disarray in the internal layout of some of these cities because they all used to have these princely haluses. And what happens in the Han period, you see some of those haluses being either repurposed for other uses as administrative offices. Once these places are incorporated into the administrative geography, so the commandery system, the Han redeveloped industries in some of these cities so that you get workshops.

20:53This is where in the warring state period you had elite quarters are to get turned into workshop regions. So this is what I mean, like the downgrading and kind of a reworking of the political authority of the past. That's really interesting. Is that going to be because of top down decision making? So the Han decided no more palace for you, little town. You're going to get a carpentry. Or is it more that the population just naturally gravitated to places like Chang'an and Luoyang because they were where the action was happening, like people moving from rural areas to cities nowadays, or is it both? Yeah, that could very well be because I think the Han removed or relocated for possibly some of those world families to Taiwan, removing their power, removing the things from their base of power, and therefore turning those cities into what we consider more multi-purpose,

21:54functional cities rather than a temple symbolic center. And of course the local king, you can keep an eye on him if he's right down the street at the capital. So it's a way of stopping them from fomenting rebellion and rising up against the center, right? So speaking of the center, something that I know you've worked on quite a bit is the relationship between the central lens of China. You were talking about the central planes earlier and the neighboring peoples. And I have to admit that's really only come into our story so far when we were talking in passing about warfare with northern peoples or the building of the Great Wall, things like that. But I think that anyone who's listened to this whole series would solve a very vague idea of what this even means. So we've got the central area and some people living around it. So what kind of people are we talking about here? Are we talking about lots of different kinds of people? And also what's the nature of the relationship between these other peoples and the peoples

22:56of the central planes during the Han Dynasty? I know that's a big question, but maybe you can sketch it for us. Well we know from the received histories that there were significant episodes of population relocation from the central planes into places like the Hoshite Northwest region. And I have to make just a distinction between what I consider the northwest is two different areas. There is the Hoshite corridor, which is what's modern day guns. So when you have the areas further west, like Xinjiang, Lai, Xinjiang, that's like a region called Xi-Yu. I think those are more like outposts in areas indirectly governed by the Han State. But the area along the Hoshite corridor was a region that underwent dramatic population transformation because of these relocation episodes from the interior in the cells where we have probably less accounting for in the Shiji and the Han Shu. There is a lot of excavated texts from places like Hunan and also now from Yunnan where

24:04I work of Han settlements, administrative texts that come out of wells, burials, and what those texts are starting to show is that there are like two different kinds of frontier subjects. Administrators will differentiate between a Han subject and a non-Han subject in these French regions. Presumably the non-Han subjects are so called the barbarians and newly incorporated peoples. And some of these texts are text documents that are often cover cases or legal cases where there's some adjudication around how much pull text is a Han settler have to pay versus a non-Han subject. Usually the non-Han subject pays less, at least from the excavated text on the southern frontier. So what's interesting is I was trying to get a sense of the administrators are trying to figure out how to manage different kinds of subjects on their frontier.

25:05And governance isn't just this top down thing. It's being developed in real time on the ground. And so this is not just a practice along the southern frontier. I think up in the Hoshikorador there are also administrative texts that showcase this dynamic where the local officials are trying to figure out what is a viable tax rate that takes into account different kinds of subjects. So on the policy that being worked out on the ground was something that doesn't appear in the transmitted histories. And I think that adds a really important component to understanding the Han Empire as a project. And the techniques that are essential to early forms of imperialism. And the permeability of the edge, right? Also which show itself in material culture, right? So you even talked about the way that what people are eating may reveal things about population movement. And I know that over the longer term there was influence of, for example, artistic practices

26:09or styles across the border, the supposed border between the central part of China and the outer-lying regions. So that would be one example maybe the way people dress, all kinds of things like this, right? And I think there's some really interesting derials in the Northwest where their joint husband, wife derials, but the wife, she's wearing pants, she's not. That gives you all, you know, well, maybe she's not even Han because of, you know, step people, I think even women on horseback, maybe they're in pants. For British listeners, Alice means trousers, not underwear. Right. I always think her pants sitting up in her chair at the mention of pants. That's the easiest to us, Australian English. Right. Sorry, you were saying. Oh, okay. It's like when you're talking about like porous. Yes, it's, there's a big surveillance state up there. I don't want to like underplay that in any way because there are a lot of military garrisons. But there are also these kind of porous episodes of exchange where you wonder about the individuals

27:13who are broken in the kind of cross-cultural areas. I mean, the term border is also heavily debated by philologists for this period. There are like multiple terms is border even appropriate translation. Yeah, it's uns too fixed right into well-defined perhaps for what you're describing. I mean, going back to the idea of all under heaven, from the text, I think we often have this conception that these Chinese philosophers think of themselves as in this kind of privileged place, everything else outside it doesn't count. And there is a kind of isomorphism. And there is a matching structure between the universe and China as a place and then the city and maybe even down to the house. And then it's maybe somehow depicted on the back of a mirror as you were saying. But it sounds like it drives unsurprisingly. And archaeology tells us if we draw a single lesson from this whole discussion is that life on the ground was a lot messier.

28:15So you do see these ideologies in the material culture, but you also see the ideologies kind of failing to really get a complete control over what's happening on the ground. And China might be an example. Yeah, the all under heaven is an abstraction. But one with actual physical ramifications now in the Han period, where are the limits of all under heaven? I think that is actually to use leafy strokes, it's like science of the concrete. You know, there's actually an empirical problem, not just one, like that's ideological for the Han. It's like, well, what are the actual empirical manifestations of all under heaven on the ground now? Not walls, we've got fields that are moving out. We've got people who want to eat millet out there, you know, those are the people. Is it where the fields end? Is that where all under heaven is limits lay?

29:18So yeah, I guess if it's like one, one takeaway from this talk, it's like, how can we maybe approach all under heaven again as a real kind of spatial construct, a geographical construct? Okay, that's a good note to end on. And I think everything we've talked about shows that historians of philosophy would do well to learn more about, if not archaeology itself, and at least something about the material culture, because it does tell us something about the world that these philosophers were living in and trying to describe and maybe often idealizing. So thank you so much for taking us through that. Notwithstanding the messiness on the ground, next time we're going to be talking about theories of metaphysics and cosmology or in the next few episodes, we're going to be doing that. So that's what's coming along. People who thought that was too concrete, don't worry. We're going to get back to nice abstract ideas in the coming episodes. But for now, I'll thank Alice. Yeah, very much for coming on the podcast. Look, thank you, Peter.

30:18And please join me in carrying us. We return to good old cosmology and metaphysics in the coming episodes of the history of philosophy in China.